Category: tech

The Delicious Chrome Extension currently has 33,414 users and is rated 4/5 stars. However, until yesterday’s release, you had to manually close the popup window after you saved a new bookmark. It wasn’t unusable, but it was terribly annoying at best.

Another well-received feature is it’s customizable keyboard shortcut. Some people like commnd-D, others like control-D or maybe you like something entirely random to save your bookmarks; It’s totally up to you.

Maybe Google views themselves as adept as Apple, and are convinced that cutting off any “weaker alternatives” is the only way to get, what they believe to be, the superior WebM codec into the real world. I bet they even believe that someday this decision will be heralded as a great step forward. Like Apple with the floppy drive.

A nice tidbit on Google’s “openness” stance:

If openness is so important that Google is willing to remove features from Chrome, there is no way that the company should be shipping Flash in Chrome.

And:

… <video> will now become: the iOS fallback tag. Flash will remain the preferred solution for “real” browsers, and the only people using <video> will be those catering to iOS.

Fallback tag? With the way things are going, iOS will NOT be considered the fallback!

I figured out how to run NPR and surf the web at the same time on the iPad. Multitasking, months before iPad iOS 4 is slated for availability.

Open up Safari and surf to your favorite site (I chose my Delicious.com network page, great links in there).

Buy an $8.00 radio from your local bodega and tune it to NPR.

The greatest thing about this hack is that you can continue to use NPR outside of available wifi zone’s (note: most iPad apps will cease working). You can also tune your NPR to MLB for the latest baseball game. No monthly, extra, or one-time fees required.

Font Squirrel appears to be a great font generator that will create the various formats needed for the cross-browser use of @font-face. Some colleagues and I have recently been waxing poetically on the legality of using purchased fonts using this CSS2 based method of font embedding. Especially when deployed for clients, in a commercial environment. While @font-face is a bit overdue to go mainstream (A List Apart was touting it as the next big thing in 2007), now that the browsers are coming of age, the tipping point is near. It will dominate other options that are currently bridging the gap, like http://typekit.com. However, we have come to the conclusion that now is the time to pay more attention to a fonts use policy. Some will explicitly forbid the designer/developer from exposing the font file online. Some will encourage it, and I assume,many more will not mention it. This means web shops should start gathering and using libraries filled with the fonts that encourage the use of @font-face. Here’s where I’m starting. As linked in the previous ALA article: Dieter Steffmann offers up a slew of freely usable fonts and I’m sure several more lists like this, @font-face and 15 Free Fonts You Can Use Today, exist.

…foundries donâ€™t actually claim copyright in the typefaces themselves. Instead they claim copyright on the .ttf file (or whatever) as a piece of software. Then, when you buy the right to use the software, they make you click â€œAgreeâ€ to an EULA which prohibits you from uploading the file to your website. If you want your users to see your font over the web, then you need to send them that file, and the EULA says you canâ€™t.

Facebook’s personalized search, widely accepted as their best path towards maximum monetization, is becoming increasingly less relevant as our real social connections, both online and off, now have the ability to rise to the top of the most coveted spot online; Our search results page. Google Social Search is a just launched, opt-in experiment within Google labs.

“It’s strongly connected to Google Profiles and Gmail. For example, if you add a link to your Twitter page on your Google profile, Google will find the people you follow and the content they produce: blogs, photo albums, videos, reviews. If your query returns useful results from your social connections, Google will display the results at the bottom of the search results pages.” Also Included in your search results are items from your Google Reader subscriptions and websites, public profiles, and other content linked to from your friends’ profiles.

Social search includes results from the public connections of your immediate circle of friends. In other words, friends of friends are counted as members of your social search. Think of them as ‘friend of a friend’ recommendations that take place in the real world more often than we may realize. Your trusted sources are also being included in your social circle via the content you’ve chose to subscribe to in Google Reader.

What makes Google’s approach to personalized, or social search, more relevant than Facebook’s is that Google is using content of a much higher value. Content that your immediate circle and extended circle are creating and trusting on the rest of the internet. Add this wide network to your search and you’re looking at seemingly limitless, very high value, and pretty damn relevant, search results.